Hari Shanker R 9:13 am on January 24, 2024
Tags: 5ftF ( 12 ), Five for the Future ( 12 )

Proposal: Updates to Five for the Future from the Community Summit

Last year, I published a blog post requesting feedback from contributors on how to improve the contributor journey of WordPress. The post, which garnered insightful feedback, was followed up by an innovative session on Five for the Future at the recent WordPress Community Summit. What follows below are actionable recommendations for our program based on Community Summit discussions to achieve our collective goal of making the WordPress contributor experience the best it can be.

Effort Impact Analysis

In view of our contributors’ precious volunteer time, we can only implement the most impactful ideas from Summit Discussions. Experienced Five for the Future contributors @nao and @jeffpaul joined me to find answers to this problem by diving deep into the Community Summit Discussion notes and dividing them into four sections as the first step: increasing program awareness, matching contributors with projects, improving participation, and addressing problems. We then rearranged the discussion points based on these action items in the following Google Doc for clarity.

Next, we further divided the ideas into four discrete categories: Process Improvement, Visualization, Sponsorship (of contributors by companies), and Mentorship. We then listed all the ideas (and their corresponding categories) in an ‘Effort Impact Matrix graph’ with ‘Effort’ on the X-axis and ‘Impact’ on the Y-axis. Last, we shortlist a final set of action items that are impactful, actionable, and can be achieved successfully in a shorter timeline. You can find a visual representation of our Effort/Impact Analysis in the image below, where different action items are listed in boxes on the quadrant where we felt they would best fit.
The boxes with thick blue borders are the action items we identified as most likely to have a significant impact and are achievable in 2024. You can also find the source slide of this matrix in the following link.

Effort/Impact Analysis for the Five for the Future Next Steps

Final List of Recommended Action Items

Here is our final recommended list of action items as depicted in the list below:

Process Improvement

Implement the Make/Contributor Tool into contributor recruitment for Five for the Future.
Establish constant communications with current and new pledgees to help them stay active (automated email check-ins for existing pledges and email onboarding for new pledgees)
Improve Onboarding Processes for Make/Teams – Identifying and sharing impactful projects for teams, standardizing handbooks, simplifying team handbooks, and onboarding.
Treat 5ftF Sponsorship like WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. sponsorships with similar benefits.

Sponsorship

Task-based or project-based contributor sponsorships, where companies sponsor contributor time for a certain task or project in a Make/Team.
Project/release-based contributor sponsorships where companies could sponsor external contributors for a limited time as they work on specific projects.

Visualization

Create team health dashboards for all Make/Teams, which help contributors identify impactful projects and areas that need help (Already underway).

Mentorship

To Provide dedicated mentoring and onboarding for Five for the Future companies and self-sponsored contributors.
Helping companies set up contribution teams and onboarding sponsored contributors to Make/Teams
1:1 or group mentorship to help self-sponsored contributors onboard effectively.

Next Steps and Request for Feedback

Our next steps are to incorporate feedback to refine Action Items, publish a program direction page on the Five for the Future website, and recruit contributors to focus on these items.

We would love to have your feedback before we finalize these action items and proceed toward implementing them in 2024.

Do you have any feedback on the recommended action items for Five for the Future implementation?
Which among the suggested ideas could have the highest impact, in your opinion?
Are there any missing ideas from the Community Summit Discussion in the recommended list that you strongly wish to implement?
Are you interested and available to help with any of the recommended action items?

Your feedback goes a long way in improving our project’s health and long-term sustainability. Please leave your comments on the post by ~~February 7, 2024~~ February 16, 2024.

The following people contributed to this blog post: @harishanker @nao @angelasjin @jeffpaul

#5ftf, #five-for-the-future

Juan Hernando 9:39 am on January 26, 2024
Do you have any feedback on the recommended action items for Five for the Future implementation?
I think the proposal is really well thought out and fantastic. The categorisation is perfect. Much work is needed, but the result can make a difference.

Which among the suggested ideas could have the highest impact, in your opinion?
Contacting the people who have made the pledges is essential because it could allow us to know in more detail the reality of how many people are collaborating in the teams (I understand it is almost impossible, but there is a lot of unrealistic pledging).

Improving and standardising each team’s onboarding and documentation, working on projects, or looking for simple tasks for newbies can benefit all of us as a community. Even among veterans, there is a lot of unfamiliarity about how other teams work, so anything we can share will be beneficial.

Are there any missing ideas from the Community Summit Discussion in the recommended list that you strongly wish to implement?
From the ideas of the Community Summit, I perhaps miss a couple of details:
- give individual contributors tools to pitch to their companies/potential sponsors about 5ftF, its benefits, and what they will get in return.
- share much more outwardly what we do inwardly in the project. It’s all amazing, but the impact is reduced if we don’t tell about it in different channels, and every extra piece of info is welcome.
Are you interested and available to help with any of the recommended action items?
Of course I am! You know that wherever I can help, I am happy to do what I can to increase the 5ftF’s impact at all levels.
- Javier Casares 10:20 am on January 27, 2024
  
  +1
  
  I’m talking for myself, but probably is something all Team Reps have in mind, is that in the pledges we have thousands of people and most likely you don’t know about most of them.
  
  For example, in the Hosting Team we have almost a thousand pledges, but when we do a year-summary, we find that only a hundred participate actively for the Team.
  
  Having tools to send some kind of notification for projects will be great, so people can participate or leave the pledge if they are not interested.
  - Nora Ferreirós 10:39 am on February 1, 2024
    
    I just wanted to give support to the Juan’s ideas, specially those related to onboarding and team’s bureaucracy.
    
    Although I am a Team RepTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts., I have just discovered the Team Pledge Contributors pages (thank you Javier). We have exactly the same problem Javier has described (I imagine all the teams have it), so I also highly support the idea of working on how we can communicate better with pledges.
    
    Altogether (onboarding and communication proposals) could help teams to be able to communicate better what they (we) do, so companies may have a clear vision about why, where or how sponsor contributors (especially those that are external to their teams —promoting the sponsorship of freelancers was a very interesting topic that was discussed at the Community Summit and I highly support).
    - Gus Austin 8:54 pm on February 2, 2024
      
      Create team health dashboards for all Make/Teams, which help contributors identify impactful projects and areas that need help (Already underway).
      
      While it’s hard to tell what the status is (or where/how to contribute), I think this goal is an attempt to address this problem. In that same proposal you’ll see a couple comments related to the Drupal contribution credit system that could not only serve as inspiration but be implemented in collaboration with some of the same folks that developed it.
Gus Austin 1:25 am on January 30, 2024

Sustainability team made an initial pass on improvements using the Community Summit Discussion notes as a guide. Skim through the comments and you’ll see we’re now discussing how to not only update and reconcile goals (and needs) but joining forces and pooling resources.
Nahuai Badiola 11:50 am on February 2, 2024

Thanks for putting the proposal together, it’ great!

Really good points have been made on the proposal and the comments above.

If I had to choose one that I think it could have a big impact on the 5FTF it would be “recruiting” more companies to join.
Having a bigger pool of sponsors could really have a positive impact on contributors and WordPress project overall.

For that, I guess we should be able to communicate better the benefits, for the company, of being part of 5FTF.

During the Community Summit the idea of having a portal/website to connect active contributors and companies was mentioned and I think it could be worth exploring it. Indeed we talked about the idea on Sustain WP with Hari and other WP community members and I would love to see some movement in this direction.

In any case, I’ll happy to contribute to the project in any way I can.
- Nora Ferreirós 12:32 pm on February 2, 2024
  
  In the Community Summit some people discussed about how many contributors don’t know how to connect with companies for being sponsored, and how companies (specially the smaller ones) don’t know how or who sponsor (or even for what). Sometimes we think the lack of money is about lack of will from companies (and many times it is) but it may also be because lack of connection.
  
  This is a good point to work on too.
Gus Austin 9:33 pm on February 2, 2024

In addition to the crediting system (mentioned in this comment), Drupal has a Marketplace listing companies which provide services, hosting, training, books, and more.

By tying the crediting system to the marketplace, organizations can be highlighted based on a wide range of contributions (see this guide to issue credits and the Drupal.org marketplace for inspiration and example on what we could replicate).
Patricia BT 6:01 pm on February 4, 2024

Very nice updates!

+1 to all the comments above.

Are people who plegded really contributing?

Now, we need more marketing/outreach for companies to find the Five for the Future initiative, and when they land on the main 5ftF page, if they don’t know much more about it (like we do), they might feel lost with a “so now what?” “how do I find a person to sponsor?” (be it on the long term or project specific).

Furthermore it need to be clear that 5% is indicative and that they do not need to commit to 5% (with accounting proofs such as with 1% for the Planet).

And for the persons looking to be sponsored, same questions, besides the “participate” links at the bottom of the page, it’s not that clear how people can find a sponsor.

Those 2 comments are more for sponsoring people who are not employees of the sponsoring company.

In the google doc, I see”Build a Five for the Future dashboard?”, would that help people looking for a sponsor/looking to sponsor/project needing sponsors? like a list of potential matches? it needs to be proeminent on the main 5ftF landing page.

To the question “Are you interested and available to help with any of the recommended action items?”
Yes I am, but need clarity, having a call with @harishanker soon 🙂